"We have one goal - the reunification with the motherland, and the motherland is Russia - and that is the ultimate goal of this committee, all the work is aimed only at one thing - Homecoming"
This was reported in the Russian info-sphere. At first glance, this sounds pretty obvious. After all, in the course of this three year conflict, with thousands of civilians killed, millions internally displaced, and tens of thousands of military casualties, what else has motivated the so-called 'rebels'? It wasn't for nothing that the Lugansk and Donetsk declared people's republics, separate from Ukraine.
What's surprising then is that this flies in the face of the Minsk Agreement - in which several steps are to be fulfilled. The Kiev junta has to date failed to make good on the substantive parts of this. In fact, at the Rada, numerous officials have declared that they have no intention in seeing this through. Yet, the agreement itself was made into a UN security council resolution, which passed.
Kiev was to make proposed changes to the constitution, create a decentralized system which in layman's terms can be called a 'federal system' (even if the name of Ukraine doesn't change). Interestingly here is that these were to recognize the special status of Donetsk and Lugansk and these changes in turn were to be brought to the existing authorities - that's right, the leaders of the LPR and DPR - for agreement.
Instead these constitutional changes were never made, and moreover, the Kiev junta led by Poroshenko has also made it clear that they do not recognize the existing authorities in the LPR and DPR. So what to make of it?
In reality, what we have here is a low intensity conflict, peppered with periods of a mild freeze. On the one hand, that the DPR and LPR might remain part of Ukraine, and in so being, would influence future elections in the way they had before. That is one positive aspect of the two regions remaining as a part of Ukraine - to keep Ukraine sane. On the other hand, a lot of blood has been shed, all in the recent past, and going on to this day. It's hard to imagine the 'breakaway republics' ever returning to Ukraine. According to the Minsk Agreement, with the new constitution (that never happened), there were to be new elections, seeing a new government come in under the new constitution. That seems unlikely to ever happen at this point, unless something very big happens.
So instead, we can look at the example of South Ossetia. For more than 20 years, it basically was separated from Georgia. After a failed attempt by the pro-NATO clown Saakashvilli to retake it, its independence was all but official.
The war in the Donbass has been similar to this process, only at high speed. At that speed, there came with it a lot more instability and the likelihood of a larger war. Thankfully, so far that's been avoided.
But in light of the failure of the Kiev junta to make good on the Minsk Agreement, it's no wonder that Zakharchenko would make today's announcement.
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